Facebook Home, the massive social network's take on an ideal mobile operating system, became available last week to the masses.

Facebook Home, the massive social network's take on an ideal mobile operating system, became available last week to the masses. A lot of hype, rumor, and speculation led up to the launch, but based on a few days with the platform, for Android only, it seems most of that excitement is really much ado about nothing. Layered atop Android, Facebook Home is neither app nor operating system. It's closer to a launcher, since it's the means by which you access all other apps, but because it so heavily covers up the Android below, that classification doesn't quite work either.

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FB Home completely takes over the phone, immersing you in the contextless world of the Facebook newsfeed, where you glide along on top of all your old Android apps, overwhelmed and forgetting, almost, that the entire rest of your phone is still there to entertain you.

As soon as you wake your phone from sleep, you're greeted not with a security code or swipe-to-unlock icon but with the Cover Feed: full-screen images, panning slowly, beneath status updates that change as new ones are posted. There's also your head—and that's it. Drag your head to reveal messages, other apps, and the most recent app used. You can get to your Android goodies that way, but gone are your wallpaper, folders, and widgets. FB Home wants you to stay in FB Home, and it wants to drag you back when you stray.

When it comes to chatting—through messages and texts—that tight leash is actually kind of nice. No matter what app you're in, you'll see new messages displayed next to "chat heads" (your friends' avatars), little circles that can be dragged away or engaged with. With this, Facebook demonstrates an understanding of how we communicate on our phones: all the time, immediately, and in the middle of doing other things.

Such simul-tasking also comes in the form of a pop-up web browser, which you can use to view links posted on the Cover Feed without leaving the stream of news feed updates. That's nice, too. But for casual or somewhat hesitant Facebook users (full disclosure: I am very much the latter), the fun ends there. The slow Ken Burns-style photo panning grows old within seconds, as does the idea of checking up on Facebook continuously. There's much more to smartphones than status updates about babies and photos of omelets, but FB Home makes it hard to remember that, and awkward to transition when you do. I'm not sure if Facebook made the rest of the phone—with gray backgrounds, clunky organization, and no widgets—unenticing on purpose, but it sure works to keep you stuck in the Cover Feed.

Staying there quickly becomes existentially painful: You wait for new things to scroll in (there's no "pull to refresh"-type control), eyes blurred, so you're not quite absorbing it when it does. You'd think being surrounded by your "friends" and their news would be a richly immersive experience, but it's the opposite: a collection of information stripped of its context (the time, for instance, which must be manually turned on to display) urging you to interact with everyone all the time lest you disappear within your own social graph. If you want to post something from outside FB, like a photo or website, you have to leave the app and enter the grayed-out Android world. Even the camera and phone—the phone!—are buried.

No matter the criticisms and praise, FB Home is certainly a curious experiment. The UI is unlike any other, and some features, like chat heads, are welcome changes to how we use our phones. But with the specter of homescreen advertising looming (and more ways for Facebook to track you; the company announced last week a new ad technique that combines data from your on-site activities with your internet and buying habits) and a platform that, at its core, is relatively insubstantial, FB Home comes off more like a pointless brunch status update than something revolutionary—like, say, the next Facebook.